Finding My
Inner Pole Dancer
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Dance is different things to
different people. To some, dance is pure joy of movement. To someone else, it
is forbidden sin. Dance is exercise, artistic expression, communication, a
route to seduction. Dance is children cavorting on the lawn in summer, cowboy
jitterbug at the Elks Club on Saturday night, the Senior Prom, the formal ball,
the shindig. It is the butterfly flitting flower to flower.
For me, at this time and place in my
life, dance is my doctor’s prescription.
Don’t laugh. I’m serious. Six months
ago I couldn’t walk and had a pain level of twelve on a scale of one to ten. I
began treatments with a sports medicine specialist and progress has been
steady, but evidently slower progress than Dr. Epifanio wanted to see. He sent
me off to get an X-Ray and Ultra-Sound, to check there wasn’t a hidden problem,
I guess.
That was in the morning. In the
afternoon I delivered the pictures to him at his University office. He scanned
them. Nodded. He told me I needed to work harder. I can have life or I can have
good life. That is my interpretation of what he said.
My hip joint feels cemented into
place. We knew that. The pain discouraged me. I moved that joint as little as possible. Dr. E said I
needed to move it as much as possible. All directions. “I want you to dance,”
he told me while he grabbed a five-foot pole and rotated his hips in front of
it, “twenty minutes a day.” “Do you have a boyfriend?” he asked. I shook my
head in the universal negative. “You should get one.”
In the spring, should I live so
long, I will be seventy. Nevertheless, I blushed and giggled. “You want me to
pole dance?”
What makes this story woo-woo
strange, is that two months ago, my friend Kathy and I were walking south on Avenida
Gaviotis. In front of a corner building with two-story window walls, we
stopped. For years the building was home to a high-end jewelry store but with
the downfall in the economy, the building has stood empty. Now it looks like a
low-end dump, windows cracked, filled with trash, walls enhanced with graffiti.
“This would make a perfect
pole-dance studio,” I said.
“I can see it. Repair the windows,
paint the walls, the right lighting, perfect,” Kathy agreed. “We’ll hire street
bands, live music.”
“There are plenty of beautiful girls
to teach the moves. We’ll sit in the back room and manage the joint, rake in
the money.”
“Let’s call the landlord and get
started. When Richard gets here, we’ll have him write a check.”
Over the years Kathy and I have
created a hundred fantasy businesses and solved most of the world’s problems.
Some ideas are flash-in-the-pan. Others, like our pole dance studio, live on
for months. We keep adding details. Richard just laughs and grips his wallet.
In the early morning reality, as the
sun peeks over the hills, I don my baggiest shirt and head out the door for my
walk, hips subtly swiveling as I go. Emphasis on subtle. Only the tiniest
movement, anything more is too painful. But mostly, I don’t want to be a
spectacle.
Oh, I know I am marking time. Hip
surgery is in the offing. Dr. E and I talked about it in the margins of our
discussion. Meanwhile I follow his directions to keep strengthening my leg
muscles.
In the privacy of my own home, I get
creative. You should see me sweep and mop. Housework is an event rather than a
mundane chore. I’m rather amazed what is possible with imagination and a broom.
Or even the swish of a dust cloth. Twist and turn. One, two, three,
side-to-side, slide forward, slide back, promenade left, sashay right, circle those hips, around the broom and around
the room.
Sondra
Ashton
HDN: Looking
out my back door
December 18,
2014
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